The Veale File: Vol 1 - Advance to Barbarism - Development of Total Warfare from Sarajevo to Hiroshima

The main object of Advance to Barbarism is to call attention to the terrible retrogression of civilized humanity towards the worst cruelties of barbarism. The so-called Wars of Religion were sometimes savage, but in the eighteenth century it was possible to talk of civilized warfare, in which certain humane conventions were observed. Gibbon notices this advance in decent behavior with complacency. A writer in the eighteenth century might reasonably speak of war as a relic of barbarism. Advance to Barbarism was first published in England in 1948. It was a noteworthy little book because it dealt for the first time with such then recent innovations as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations and the trials of prisoners of war by their captors as symptom of a world-wide development which had begun in 1914.